ericseppanen

For little kids (4-5): Catan Junior, My First Stone Age, Patchwork, Hoot Owl Hoot. For slightly bigger kids: Quirkle, Takenoko, Tokaido, Sushi Go, Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne.

I generally find TableTop to be a well-curated source of games; games that look fun on the show have always gone over well for me.

More pretty graphs here about the big outsourcing firms' H1B salary distributions: https://www.axios.com/h1-b-salaries-2228205505.html

Sorry, where? I'm not seeing it.

It's unfortunate that most of the people writing about the problems with H-1B visas can't distinguish between companies that hire the best they can get (and paying competitive salaries), and outsourcing companies that file a ton of applications (and pay their employees much less).

This approach seems deliberately lazy, as though it's some kind of head-scratcher that the displaced IT support guy hates his outsourced replacement; while the Googles and Microsofts of the world support a program that allows them to hire top engineers from all over the globe.

I find it especially galling that this NYT writer can't make the distinction, given their paper did a great article about H-1B abuse by outsourcing firms: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/06/us/outsourcing...

Assuming the press articles are correct, Theranos class B stock has 100x voting power. Investors may not have sufficient voting power to overrule the founder(s).

5-nines uptime means anticipating that the components (hardware and software) you bought from another company may fail in devious, correlated ways.

Failure to do so is simply incompetence.

Maybe the customer didn't read the fine print of their service guarantees, and that's on them. I would hope that doesn't happen often-- it would be very silly if service guarantees fell apart every time some piece of shoddy equipment (purchased and operated by the service provider) turns out to be at fault.

- Fixes for compiler bugs; probably not that likely, but I'm used to knowing that on a free toolchain I can always try a newer version to see if it exhibits the same behavior. Being locked to an old version feels risky.

- New language dialects (i.e. C++11). It's annoying to not be able to use the same techniques you use elsewhere because your ASIC core vendor made your compiler decision for you.

- New compiler features. It's no fun to have some clever trick I use other places fail to build because it depends on a compiler warning or some other GCC-ism that's present in all my other environments.

I also like to write unit tests and other simple mockups that can build and run on a plain linux machine, so it's nice to keep the delta between the two compilers as small as possible.

The "add your own instructions" thing is a pretty cool, no doubt. I would be surprised if most ASIC designs really really need the low latency that provides, especially considering the other costs involved in adopting a minor-league ISA.

From what I can tell, they have structured it in a way that it's a violation in spirit, but not in letter.

They don't link to GCC code directly; instead they output the intermediate representation and execute a standalone binary to finish processing the IR. They offer source code for all their GCC modifications, but carefully work around the GPL to accomplish the same thing.

For those who haven't had the pleasure: developing on Tensilica Xtensa cores generally means living within 128-256KB of directly-accessible memory; a windowed register file that makes writing your own exception handlers "interesting"; a 6-year-old GCC bolted to a proprietary backend; per-seat licensing fees to use the compiler; and a corporate owner that's only halfway interested in the ecosystem they now control.

So yeah, kind of wishing it would just die and let ARM take over the embedded space.

A company at a disadvantage may find it in their own interest to act like good guys with respect to open source projects.

Fast-forward a few years: if people become dependent on the new tool and there's money to be made differentiating their tooling from others, their attitude may change.

The debate about licenses becomes more interesting once a contributor finds themselves in a position of power vs other contributors.

Or maybe they just get tired of having to vet their changes and designs with third parties. Getting code accepted upstream can be a lot of work.